The Top 10 Films of 1958

We’re hopping once more into our way-back machine! Thus far this year, we’ve covered the top 10 films of 2008, 1938, 1988, 1968, 1978, and 1918. Continuing our trip through years ending in 8, we now cover the top ten films of 1958.

In 1958 the baby boom was tapering off and the rumblings of ’60s-style cultural upheaval were beginning to be felt. Yet President Eisenhower still enjoyed considerable popularity and signed into creation the FAA as well as NASA, signaling the beginning of the space race after the Soviet’s successful satellite deployment the previous year. Alaska’s statehood was also signed into law, allowing it become a state the following year (Hawaii’s approval came later, but it too would attain statehood in 1959.) In milestones whose impact would not be understood for some time, The Beatles recorded their first song under the name The Quarrymen, and the microchip was invented. Meanwhile, the Cold War brewed in the background.

The cinema of 1958 reflects a little bit of all of these events and changes. To many historians, Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn was the last of the great Hollywood movie moguls, and he died in 1958. United States cinema was still very much awash in ’50s culture — culture later mined for nostalgia purposes in films like Back to the Future — but major change was coming, and the art of the times reflects it. Le Beau Serge and other early examples signaled the beginning of the hugely influential French New Wave. On the other hand, movie musicals remained reliable earners with Gigi and South Pacific among the box office winners for the year before the decline of the genre in the ’60s. Gigi would go on to win Best Picture.

As is a trend for the 20th century’s middle decades, many of the movies that were popular in their day haven’t remained well-loved over time, while movies that may have been little-known then have risen in our collective estimation. Flickchart’s top 10 reflects a wide swath of cinema from acclaimed directorial masters both domestic and foreign. A sprinkling of horror also finds its place. Let’s take a look at what the users of Flickchart have collectively deemed the top 10 films of 1958:

In 1955 Walter Lord published what is widely considered the definitive narrative of the 1912 sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic. Written largely in the dramatic style of a novel, its stories are all firsthand accounts from interviews with survivors that Lord was able to track down. Three years later, bolstered by even more firsthand accounts that surfaced, this British production debuted. It is still widely considered the definitive cinematic treatment of that disastrous night, despite James Cameron‘s epic and record-breaking 1997 version. It was at the time the most expensive production in England’s cinematic history. It’s important not to be dismissive of Cameron’s version, though it has been the target of plenty of deserved criticism; many new details of the disaster came to light over the four decades between the two films, and Cameron depicted this in his signature authentic and spectacular fashion. Despite his tendency to romanticize, he also focused much more on the plight of the passengers than the 1958 version does, especially the passengers in Third Class, who were criminally overlooked and suffered disproportionate casualties.

However, A Night to Remember remains the tighter and more accurate narrative of the two. The book is also an engaging read, full of literary flourishes but never indulging in too much poetic license. Roy Ward Baker, using a solid screenplay from Eric Ambler, directs the adaptation with a sure hand. The film unfolds from the perspective of a desperate, under-prepared, but determined crew led Second Officer Lightoller, portrayed by a commanding Kenneth More. Baker’s large cast also includes David “Dispersal” McCallum and Honor “Pussy Galore” Blackman, as well as brief appearances by a pre-Q Desmond Llewelyn and Bernard Fox, who would go on to play Colonel Gracie in Cameron’s 1997 film. A Night to Remember remains an entertaining, suspenseful, expertly crafted, and heartbreaking vision of the maritime disaster that would challenge and change the Western world. – Tom Kapr

From the opening of his 1958 film The Magician, Ingmar Bergman is up to his usual tricks. The film starts with a desperate ride through darkness, replete with a dead body, Max von Sydow in heavy makeup and silence, and Ingrid Thulin in male drag. Quite a transformation has happened by the end when the titular magician is cast out in broad daylight, symbolizing a society moving out of superstition and towards rational thought. Skepticism of the supernatural is commonplace for Bergman, but The Magician is also one of the director’s most political films, with its focus on Vogler (Sydow) having to put on a magic show to convince the authorities of his worth. The politicians’ wager on his show represents how artists are, if not outright censored, then certainly viewed with suspicion by the government. Bergman returned to these themes in 1969 with The Ritein more stark and extreme terms, coincidentally(?) casting The Magician costars Ingrid Thulin and Gunnar Björnstrand. The Magician wears its anti-authoritarian politics on its sleeve in many scenes, such as one where a police officer is referred to as a pig, followed up by a quick bacon joke. This might be the first time that happened on screen. – Walter J. Montie

The Defiant Ones is one of the earlier directorial efforts from Stanley Kramer, who had been a producer of socially conscious films throughout the Red Scare and Hollywood blacklisting of the late ’40s and early ’50s. Those witch-hunts were every bit as much against racial equality as they were against actual Communist infiltration. Communists, liberals, Jews, social progressives, immigrants, and basically anybody who wasn’t a WASP — there was no place for them in the American ideal being preached in Washington in the wake of World War II. Our country has been fighting these battles for decades, and Kramer was a great warrior for progress, turning out film after film in support of racial harmony and against zealous bigotry. The Defiant Ones remains one of his most poignant and enduring films, featuring Tony Curtis in perhaps his best role, and a young Sidney Poitier beginning his decade-long streak as the face of black America in film, sometimes literally slapping down racism. As a pair of convicts escaped from a chain gang but still stuck together by their irons, the two men need to learn to exist together to survive, eventually coming to respect and even protect each other. – Tom Kapr

As much as Hammer Films would eventually be remembered for their sexy and violent movies, they didn’t entirely start out that way, though elements of the formula were always present. In the 1950s, Hammer films contained heavy doses of atmosphere, quick pacing, and thoughtful, intelligent heroes, though they were occasionally hampered by odd character choices. Horror of Dracula is a case in point. Running a brisk 82 minutes, it’s a sparse adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic horror novel that retains the book’s device of being told through diary pages. So without much in the way of buildup or a totally unnecessary middle-ages prologue, you may recall that Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) already knows his host, Count Dracula (Christopher Lee), is up to no good. Much good that does him. It falls to Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) to pick up the pieces and save the day.

Christopher Lee clearly dominates the action with his regal and brooding presence, and makes one hell of an entrance, but he is not actually in much of the movie. Cushing (himself no slouch in the dramatic entrance department) plays a thinking man’s hero. He had established this type of role in the previous year’s The Abominable Snowman, also for Hammer, but without Benedict Cumberbatch’s smugness or Jeff Goldblum’s tics and 25-foot stature. Van Helsing, with the exception of the one time somebody thought Hugh Jackman would be a good idea, is usually depicted as an elderly man, but Cushing (45 here) does not seem out of his depth in the least. Conveying a great deal of intelligence and inspiration, he also pulls off being a man of action, helpful when facing a vampire Count. – Walter J. Montie

The early Jacques Tati films starring Tati himself as Monsieur Hulot are straight comedies; Hulot is a figure of fun, and we laugh at him or with him. Silent and clueless, he is like a French, midcentury Mr. Bean. Later, though, as Tati’s films got more and more elaborate, their mechanical sets and practical effects ever more ambitious and costly, the character of Hulot subtly changed. He was less an unwitting clown and more an audience surrogate, wandering through futuristic landscapes in a haze of tranquil unflappability and vague wonder. He was certainly the director’s surrogate; by 1967’s Playtime it was clear that Hulot was merely Tati’s excuse to construct another series of expensive Rube Goldbergian vignettes. Mon Oncle, though, exists in the middle of that transition. The film’s perspective is that of a young child, Hulot’s nephew, who lives in a mechanized house of the future — the sort that 1950s audiences thought we would all be living in by the 1980s, or the 1990s at the very latest. The movie derives comedy from the house’s elaborate gadgets backfiring — or perhaps working as intended — on unsuspecting visitors. It is, like most Hulot movies, something of a satire of manners with its target the materialistic excesses of the nouveau riche, but there is never any doubt as to what fun Tati is having with those excesses. – David Conrad

Henri Decaë, the cinematographer behind one of the French New Wave’s most beloved works, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, shot a number of films for director Louis Malle. 1958’sElevator to the Gallows brought Malle and Decaë together for the first time, and also proved to be the breakout role for the 30-year-old actress Jeanne Moreau. Before Gallows, Moreau’s expressive visage had not been given the proper freedom to entrance audiences. Decaë shot Moreau in natural light with little makeup. As pointed out by Roger Ebert, Moreau “is often illuminated only by the lights of the cafes and shops that she passes; at a time when actresses were lit and photographed with care, these scenes had a shock value, and influenced many films to come.” With Gallows, Moreau would become the face that launched the New Wave.

Back in the early 2000s when I first saw the film, my interest in it had more to do with the jazz score by Miles Davis than the cinematography or Moreau’s seductively pouty lips. Once I witnessed her close up during the opening scene, though, as she passionately declared “Je t’aime” to her paramour over the phone, well… that was it for me. My blind purchase of the Criterion DVD lead to the most momentous of all my cinematic infatuations (followed closely by Brigitte Bardot in Contempt). Since then, Moreau has been a favorite actress of mine. Watching her wander despondently through Paris looking for her lover, who is trapped in the elevator of the title, never gets old. – Chad Hoolihan

Based on a play of the same name by Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof follows the Pollitt family during a family gathering to celebrate the 65th birthday of Big Daddy (Burl Ives) and the news that he has beaten cancer. Among the party are Big Daddy’s two sons, one of whom is Brick (Paul Newman), a heavy drinker and former high school sports star. Brick is constantly rejecting the advances of his wife Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) and their shattered marriage plays a large role in the movie’s story, as does the news that Big Daddy’s clean bill of health is, in fact, a lie. For roughly the first half, the film is a fairly faithful adaptation of Williams’s play, but the second half wildly diverges from the source material to the point where Williams allegedly told people queuing for the film: “This movie will set the industry back 50 years. Go home!”

The play deals with issues of sexuality, sexism, and homosexuality — difficult themes to get past the censors of the era. Rather than presenting a neutered version of that story, the filmmakers take the second half in a new direction exploring admittedly more familiar (though no less important) themes like wealth, love, and the importance of what we leave behind. In both the play and the film, death and how we approach it are important concepts, and in that sense the movie remains true to the spirit of the play, though the screenwriters clearly take a more optimistic view than Williams. It’s understandable that the playwright was unhappy to see his work altered, but if you judge it on its own merits Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is still stunning. It has fantastic performances from Newman, Ives, and Taylor. It tells its story passionately, with determination, and atmospherically, with the sweltering Mississippi heat leaking through the screen. – Naomi Laeuchli

“Akira Kurosawa” and “comedy” aren’t words that often appear together, but three of his global top 10 lie somewhere on the funny side of the spectrum. Of those, The Hidden Fortress is the earliest, coming out in 1958 after the director released two adaptations of very serious foreign stage plays in 1957. It was his and his longtime cowriters’ first wholly original screenplay in three years, but you’d never know it from the confidence of their tonal shift. It is, to be sure, another period piece set in the director’s favored pre-Edo period, but it is a lighthearted adventure like nothing before in Kurosawa’s repertoire. Like 1954’s Seven Samurai though, there is not a sole protagonist, but an ensemble that slowly comes together, beginning with two dim-witted peasants and expanding to Toshiro Mifune‘s stoic samurai and Misa Uehara‘s strong-willed princess on the run. Mifune and Uehara ultimately steal the show – his godlike stature near the end, resplendent and beaming in glistening armor, is how he’s often remembered, while watching a young woman stand up to him is a rare treat – but those bickering, goofball peasants famously made enough impact on a young George Lucas that they provided the templates for his C-3PO and R2-D2. It’s the Star Wars connection that brings a lot of modern viewers to The Hidden Fortress, so much so that it’s virtually impossible to write even a blurb about the movie without acknowledging it, but the film is equally important for adding a new weapon to Kurosawa’s formidable arsenal; he would wield comedy again to powerful effect in 1961’s Yojimboand 1962’s Sanjuro, both of which join The Hidden Fortress in Flickchart’s global top 250. – David Conrad

Where to start with Orson Welles and Touch of Evil? Welles’ career started as the wunderkind given a blank check with Citizen Kane, which is now often considered among the greatest films ever made. It was basically the first and last time he was given such control; his later films were often disastrously recut by studios or left unfinished as his independent funds ran out. Touch of Evil definitely had its fair share of studio interference. The version we have now is a triumph of restoration, made according to Welles’ book-length memo about how he would’ve cut it had the studio not taken it away from him. Touch of Evil begins with one of the most impressive tracking shots in all of cinema, following a car through a busy border town — we know the car has a bomb in it, so as it winds through streets and pedestrians, the tension ratchets up every second it doesn’t go off. It ends with a descent into sleaze and corruption that marks not just the end of this film, but the end of classical film noir. If Charles Foster Kane is an idealist undone by his own lack of empathy, Touch of Evil‘s Quinlan (Welles) is so far past any sense of humanity that with him noir reached the apotheosis of its fatalistic, nearly-nihilistic worldview. This is a stark film, make no mistake about it.

But it’s also stylistically on point. Aside from that opening tracking shot, every shot and scene is honed not only for greatest impact, but also to preserve the raw and lurid factor that Welles is aiming for. There’s no glamour here, though faded glimpses remain in Marlene Dietrich’s bar owner Tana, who once knew a different Quinlan. What made him the way he is is hinted at but never told; his backstory barely matters when he has sunk so low. Welles may be best known as a director, but it’s often his turns as an actor that stick with one the most, and Quinlan is perhaps his most memorable. A man who’s seen too much, drunk too hard, and only has the facade of a false reputation to show for it. I haven’t mentioned the ostensible leads: Charlton Heston as an upright Mexican cop (I know) and Janet Leigh as his new wife. They uphold the righteous side of noir, but let’s face it, that’s not why noir is compelling. The depraved mirror on humanity that Quinlan holds up is the reason we can’t look away — we’re fascinated by its very repulsiveness. – Jandy Hardesty

It should come as little surprise when the top film of a given year from the 1950s-60s belongs to the great Alfred Hitchcock. The Master of Suspense’s dominance as a director is clear with acclaimed film after acclaimed film; he has six in Flickchart’s top 100. Vertigo‘s reputation has grown in recent years, and it recently took down Citizen Kane in BFI’s Best Films of All Time poll as, yes, the best film of all time, after decades of dominance by the Welles picture. While Vertigo has many elements common in Hitchcock’s work — suspense, an icy blonde (Kim Novak here), Jimmy Stewart, a mystery, and superbly directed scenes — it stands unique among his filmography for the depths it contains. This is not Hitchcock simply keeping his audience on edge with a tightly-wound mystery. Vertigo explores themes of identity, fear, love, and more. Some critics complain that the film is overly long, poorly-paced, and ponderous in its web of plot details. But this is Hitchcock’s intent: to place the viewer in Stewart’s shoes and wrap you in a web of wrong turns until you experience your own type of mental vertigo.

Hitchcock’s direction here is a career best. From the fantastic use of color throughout the film — especially the bright greens and disorienting reds — and the expertly placed noir shadows, Vertigo is a visual feast. Several psychedelic sequences, playing on the themes of identity, demonstrate Hitchcock beating Bergman (Persona), Altman (3Women), and Lynch (Mulholland Dr.) to the punch with the idea of displaced blonde women, though those later directors would all use the concepts in differing ways. In response to recent critical poll results some may call Hitchcock overrated, and perhaps that’s inevitable, but Vertigo takes those criticisms and shoves them off a tall building. If there is one film he should be remembered for, it is this one. – Connor Adamson

Global rank: 49

Wins 59% of matchups

29,996 users have ranked it

357 have it at #1

4,006 have it in their top 20

Blogger’s Picks

Though the above list represents the collective tastes of Flickchart users around the globe, our bloggers have their own personal favorites that don’t make the cut. Read on:

The Blob is in an elite group of B-movies from the 1950s. Alongside others such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, and The Fly, it rose above its station to become a genuine classic. The combination of smart writing, inspired directing, a sense of subtext, and a general abhorrence for cliché elevate these films above their genre kin. This one features Steve McQueen in his earliest lead role in a feature, showcasing the innate star talent that would set him on a trajectory to become Hollywood’s King of Cool in pictures such as The Great Escape and Bullitt. Though ostensibly playing a teenager, McQueen was already 28 at the time. Featuring special effects that still have the power to impress 60 years later, and a gang of teenagers who actually seem to have brains for once, The Blob is a must-see for sci-fi fans, classic cinema connoisseurs, and casual moviegoers alike. – Tom Kapr

Is this a great movie? No! But whereas The Blob represents the “classier” side of B-horror, It! The Terror from Beyond Space is a signature pulpy fun movie that actually manages to pull off some good scares. Yes, this is a low budget production. Yes, the characters can act like total goofs at times. They have the titular creature trapped under a sealed hatch and all the astronauts are safe from him, but they decide to open said hatch to see if they managed to kill the creature anyway, instead of waiting for a safe return to Earth. Lines such as, “Mars is almost as big as Texas” frequent the script. The rubber costume and other effects work won’t convince anyone today.

Despite all the B-film trappings, It! The Terror from Beyond Space actually manages to construct some tense sequences and does successfully play on the Cold War tensions that many B-horror pics of the 50s tapped into. There are some great shots, such as the picture above, from director Edward L. Cahn that convey a sense of isolation and fear. He smartly shows us little of the creature, instead allowing shadows and the fear of the unseen to work on the audience. Ultimately this film can be considered one of the earliest predecessors of Ridley Scott‘s 1979 masterpiece Alien. While not remembered alongside the classics mentioned in the above entry on The Blob, It! The Terror Beyond Space is one of the finest of its breed from this era, and the mix of old-fashioned scares and glorious cheese make for a great movie experience. – Connor Adamson

South Pacific and Apocalypse Now: Redux have an important element in common: both movies understand that the hotspots of 20th century warfare were the spaces where empires overlapped. Redux restores a cut sequence that some viewers think extraneous in which Martin Sheen’s American soldier sojourns at a French colonial plantation deep in the Vietnamese jungle. This scene makes the movie something more than just a ‘Nam movie or a palette-swapping literary adaptation; it makes it a story not of one man’s tragic descent, or even two men’s, but of repetead descents, of endless cycles of hubris and madness. Where Kurtz has gone, where Sheen is going, others have gone before, and these others have become withered and warped as well. But wait, this blurb is about South Pacific — a big, colorful musical about a much more triumphant (albeit far more deadly) war. Yet it, too, understands the significance of imperial history to the physical and social geography of war. The top-billed actor (Italian hearthrob Rossano Brazzi) isn’t playing an American G.I. or an American nurse, but a French plantation owner. He has two half-Polynesian children who provide the basis for the story’s anti-racism message and symbolize the long-term consequences of foreign conquest and entanglement. An American soldier, Cable, develops an eerie obsession with the island of Bali Ha’i and one of its beautiful inhabitants, but still has to rely on the older Frenchman’s local knowledge to carry out a dangerous mission. Compared to Apocalypse Now‘s American soldier, the one in South Pacific is arguably less fortunate, but the ending suggests that however this war turns out, a new empire will have been grafted onto the weathered remains of the old. Few war movies are so historically conscious. Oh yeah, and South Pacific has some iconic Rodgers and Hammerstein music, too, like the sadly-still-relevant earworm “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” – David Conrad

In the late 1950s, animation was changing rapidly. The classic Disney and Looney Tunes styles were giving way to a more minimalist and pop art approach championed by UPA and others. The minimalist style was also cheaper to produce (at a time when animation was suffering financially), and smaller animation studios like Terrytunes took advantage of that with shorts like The Juggler of Our Lady. The art style is very simple and spare, but also clever and often beautiful, as befits a story about a medieval juggler and his attempts to use his gift for something valuable. I’m a sucker for medieval things, and this short takes its medieval setting far more seriously than most animated shorts that use the era. Boris Karloff’s sonorous tones as the narrator don’t hurt, either. – Jandy Hardesty

Global rank: 25,869

Wins 13% of matchups

5 users have ranked it

0 have it at #1

0 have it in their top 20

How many of these have you seen? Sound off in the comments about your favorite films of 1958!

Connor is currently studying Law at Villanova University. When he isn't swamped by law readings, he watches plenty of films and sometimes writes about them. He hopes to be the most qualified evaluator of John Grisham based films at the end of law school.